


Fields of Sunflowers

by Miaou Jones (miaoujones)



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Historical, Illustrated, Love, M/M, Troubled Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-10
Updated: 2009-07-10
Packaged: 2017-10-14 00:22:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miaoujones/pseuds/Miaou%20Jones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Glimpses of Ivan and Alfred's relationship from the second half of the nineteenth century through to an undefined future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fields of Sunflowers

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for [The Hetalia Kink Meme](http://hetalia-kink.livejournal.com).

Alfred's smile is a living thing. Ivan does not know if anyone else makes this distinction between Alfred and his smile, if anyone has looked closely enough at Alfred's smile to see how it is an important part of Alfred and also an existence unto itself, but Ivan has been spending time with Alfred of late, and he has come to know Alfred's smile.

Like Alfred, his smile is brash and brilliant and tenacious. Like Alfred, his smile when it wants something is difficult to resist; more so, even, than Alfred himself. When Alfred asks if Ivan would like to see his country, he smiles. And so Ivan sets off to see America with America, and America's smile comes along, too.

Also like Alfred, his smile knows what it is doing. It is competent but it is not calculating or conniving; it is honest. Open. Alfred's smile is as wide open as the Great Plains, as enormous as the redwoods, as deep as the Grand Canyon, as reliable as Old Faithful, as…as _wholesome_ as the Midwest, America's heartland.

The first time Alfred shows Ivan his heartland, they stand on a small rise overseeing an expanse of wheat field. The amber waves of grain. As Ivan looks at them, the long grasses transmute in his mind, calling up memories of other fields, longer grasses, not waves but steppes; he closes his eyes but it only makes him see them more clearly. Early dawn light washes the grasses paler. There is a rush in his ears, a pounding as powerful as a heartbeat; the hooves of Mongolian horses pulse through his blood, spreading a heavy chill, rattling the very teeth in his head. He clenches his jaw to contain the shaking. A shadow falls between Ivan and the sun, dark, colder than winter, harsher.

He hears his name called. No one called him by his human name then, so the voice must not belong to _then_ —no, it is Alfred's voice. Alfred calling him to _now_.

Ivan opens his eyes and sees someone who can only be Alfred, backlit by the sun; then Alfred tilts his head and the sun shifts around him and Ivan sees his face clearly, he sees Alfred's smile.

"Come on," Alfred says with his smiling mouth. "There's something I want to show you."

They walk for a while before Alfred says they're close now. He stops and turns to Ivan. His face is very serious, though Ivan can see the smile resting on his lips, waiting to be called up. "Can I trust you, Ivan?"

Ivan's eyebrows arch. "Of course. We are friends, yes?"

From the look on Alfred's face, Ivan knows there is something Alfred likes in this reply and something he does not. Alfred keeps looking at him and Ivan keeps looking back, and Alfred's smile wins whatever internal argument he has been having.

"Yes," he grins. "Okay! Then I won't blindfold you. Just close your eyes, because this is a surprise."

Ivan does so. As he opens his mouth to ask how he is to find his way like this, he feels Alfred's hand curl around his and tug him forward.

"No peeking," Alfred cautions him as they slow at last. "We're almost there." But Ivan does not need to peek to know what the surprise is. Even before Alfred says, "Okay, you can open your eyes now!", Ivan knows from the scent what he will see:

Sunflowers. They are standing in the midst of sunflowers taller than Alfred, taller than himself. A field of sunflowers, their petals colored brilliantly in worship of their sun.

Ivan looks down from the petals to Alfred, to Alfred's smile. "Magnificent," he murmurs.

Alfred beams. "I knew you'd like them!"

Ivan did not mean the flowers. He does not tell Alfred this.

They fold themselves onto the ground and look up. Alfred observes that the sunflowers are bowing their heads. He looks at Ivan and smiles. "They recognize you."

Ivan thinks that they do recognize the sun, but it is not to Ivan they are bowing.

After a while, Alfred lies down, his hands tucked behind his head as he gazes up at the flowers and beyond. Ivan rests his back against a flower stalk. "Tell me something, Alfred."

Alfred turns to him, and after a moment, Ivan realizes Alfred and his expectant smile are waiting for a question.

"Ah," Ivan says. "Tell me anything." He offers Alfred a smile of his own. "The fields of sunflowers—let this be the place where we may speak, one to the other, without restraint, without fear, as intimately as two souls may."

Ivan means it, but when he hears the words from his own mouth, he thinks they do not convey the feeling inside him. He thinks they sound foolish, fanciful.

Alfred does not laugh, though. He smiles; of course he does. Alfred smiles and says, "All right," and sits up, folding himself cross-legged. Placing his hands behind him, he lets them take his weight as he looks up again. There is a faraway look on his face, but it is not dreamy—it is focused. As he begins to speak, Ivan understands that Alfred is determined to bring the far away to him. He speaks of himself: of liberty and justice, of indivisibility. He speaks of the world: of peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations.

As Alfred tells Ivan his hopes and his dreams and his fears, Ivan finds the ease with which Alfred opens himself with his own words astonishing. It is not, as others have said, naiveté. It is _passion_. It is beautiful and infectious: sitting in the sunflower field, Ivan soaks in the gorgeous infection of America's idealism.

"I want to be—" Alfred breaks off now. His brow is furrowed and at first Ivan thinks it is determination, but when Alfred begins to chew his lip, Ivan sees the frustration. Ivan finds himself leaning forward in fascinated anticipation of what Alfred wants to be. "Not a knight. I mean, knights are good—but chivalry is too old-fashioned. I want to be _modern_."

Ivan thinks with Alfred. He thinks of the grandest of his stories, so often dark, terrible in their beauty. He does not want that for Alfred. He thinks of stories he has heard from other times, other places, and although the myths he is thinking of are not modern, he thinks the concept is what Alfred is stretching for now. "Heroic?" he suggests.

"Yes!" Alfred's smile is luminous. "I'm not going to be the knight in shining armor. I'm going to be the _hero_!" He turns to Ivan, turns that luminescence on Ivan, _smiling_ at him. The radiance is palpable. Ivan wonders what it tastes like. He does not wish to spoil the purity of this moment to find out.

As Ivan looks, Alfred's smile comes closer and closer; so close Ivan can no longer see it, although he can see Alfred's eyes, which are open; so close Ivan can feel the smile against his mouth. He opens and drinks in the heat, the radiance. It does not burn him, Alfred's smile; it warms him down to the marrow of his bones.

"Do you always kiss with your eyes open?" Ivan asks with a smile when they part.

Alfred's mouth quirks into a grin. "I don't know."

They kiss again. They kiss many more times, in many more fields of sunflowers. This is what they discover: sometimes Alfred keeps his eyes open and sometimes he does not. This is what they discover: each other. This is what they discover: themselves.

In fields of sunflowers, they bare their souls to each other; their bodies, too. They lie with one another, within one another.

The first time Ivan tells Alfred he loves him, they are standing amidst sunflowers. Ivan cups Alfred's face in both of his hands, holding Alfred's upturned face, holding his gaze. It is the first time Ivan feels like the sun himself.

"I love you," Ivan tells Alfred many times; and many times, not with words but with looks and touches and breaths and his _smile_ , Alfred tells Ivan he loves him, too. Alfred never speaks the words, but the words he does speak—the articulation of his treasured ideals—are even better.

 

This year Ivan and Alfred do not meet in the sunflower fields. Ivan is losing his war with Japan, the land Alfred not so long ago opened to the world. The Land of the Rising Sun. Ivan does not know that he believes it, but it is important to know the mind of one's enemies and so he thinks about it. Since Ivan thinks the sun is setting or soon will on Western Europe, that would make America the midday sun in this extended metaphor.

Ivan thinks of the sunflowers, upturned, following the path of the sun. For the flowers, he borrows a myth from Greece: Alfred is Apollo, riding his sun chariot across the sky; like the sunflowers, the world soon will look to him. For himself, Ivan would like to rewrite that myth: two brothers, two suns crisscrossing the sky so that the earthbound, dazzled, hardly know where to look. A world illuminated, made brilliant by dual suns.

If Ivan is to become the other brother, the other sun, he must find an ideology to embrace with the passion and force that Alfred has embraced and shaped modern democracy.

 

For some while after Ivan stops going to America's sunflower fields, he thinks of them still. He wonders how they are faring. He wonders if the sun has forgotten them.

 

Years after Ivan has stopped thinking of America's fields of sunflowers, he finds himself seated on a barstool down from America, an empty seat between them. Ivan is drinking alone; Alfred also drinks alone this night.

When last call is announced, Alfred asks for the bottle. "His, too," he says without turning, and the barkeep gives him the bottle of vodka as well. "Your room?" Alfred suggests, half-turning, not quite looking, not quite smiling.

"Yes," Ivan says.

When he opens the door to his room, he smells them before he sees them: sunflowers. He flicks on the light switch: sunflowers everywhere. Bunches upon bunches in vases on every surface. He supposes Natalia sent them—until he turns and sees Alfred's blush.

 _Oh_.

They sit together on the floor, nowhere else being available. They sit and Ivan drinks a little from his bottle and Alfred only plays with his, and neither of them speaks.

Not until Alfred sighs and says, "I guess this isn't going to work. I thought—I just thought, you know. Fields of sunflowers."

Ivan does know.

Still neither of them speaks. Moments upon wordless moments pass. Ivan has stopped drinking, Alfred has stopped playing. They sit on the floor, surrounded by sunflowers, silent.

After a while, Ivan lies down and rests his head in Alfred's lap. He feels Alfred startle, but Alfred does not push him away.

Then he feels Alfred's fingers in his hair. When Ivan closes his eyes and breathes in the sunflowers and feels Alfred's caress, he can believe they are in fields of sunflowers.

Even when it starts to rain, a sunshower, the drops warmed by the sun before they fall in Ivan's hair, on his skin; even then; especially then, Ivan believes.

  


  
  
the sunshower, beautifully illustrated by [may_chan](http://may_chan.livejournal.com)   


  



End file.
